1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, a print control method, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, the number of office machines such as copying machines and printers, which can perform “cloud print”, has been increasing. The “cloud print” is a technique which allows a user to access to a cloud service via a terminal and to print a file remotely. In the “cloud print”, files can be transmitted to any printers directly from desktop type personal computers (PCs) and mobile applications without printer drivers.
Further, with the spread of smart phones and tablet type terminals, chances of browsing e-mails and web pages, and creating documents using the mobile terminals have increased. Thus, the driverless cloud service for the cloud print has been becoming a mainstream for future web services.
In addition, in the market of low cost and compact image forming apparatuses, supports for the cloud print is required, and methods for realizing the cloud print have been proposed. For example, in low price image forming apparatuses, which cannot support the print of Portable Document Format (PDF), if the output format of a print server is PDF only, the image forming apparatuses cannot acquire print data directly to print thereof.
To solve such a problem of the system configuration, a method is proposed which acquires data after converting the data via a conversion server into a format that can be printed by an image forming apparatus (e.g., Page Description Language (PDL)).
Further, even if rendering of the format that can be output by the print server is possible, performance may be deteriorated depending on the performance of the image forming apparatuses. To solve such a problem, a method has been studied, in which a most suitable format of data to be acquired is selected according to the print setting information (e.g., image quality setting value) and the operating status of the image forming apparatus, and a route for acquiring the data (data acquisition route) is dynamically switched according to the selected format.
As described above, low cost and compact image forming apparatuses employ a system configuration appropriate for the ability of the image forming apparatuses. As a result, high quality services can be provided.
However, in a case where a system configuration has a plurality of data acquisition routes, if a communication trouble occurs in a data acquisition route, data cannot be acquired through the data acquisition route, which is problematic.
As a switching technique of the data acquisition destinations in such a case, another server is selected dynamically as a new data acquisition destination server when a trouble occurs at an original data acquisition destination server, as discussed, for example, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-85058.
The main server for a data acquisition destination stores an address information list (e.g., IP addresses, media access control (MAC) addresses, model type numbers) of a plurality of servers that can be proxies of the data acquisition destination and has transmitted the address information list to a sub server in advance. When the sub server detects a communication trouble occurred between the main server for a data acquisition destination and the image forming apparatus, the sub server refers to the transmitted address information list to search for a proxy server for a data acquisition destination. When a proxy server for the data acquisition destination is found, the sub server is set as a main server. In this way, dynamic switching to a new server for the data acquisition destination can be realized.
According to the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-85058, each server is located in a same network (N/W), has a same configuration, and can be the main server or the sub server for the data acquisition destination. For this reason, each server includes a detection unit for detecting an occurrence of a communication trouble of the server for the data acquisition destination and a generation unit (an interface for notifying IP addresses or MAC addresses) for generating an address information list used for searching for a server.
However, it is not practical for the cloud print to set a plurality of servers to have a same configuration as discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-85058. Further, since the system has a configuration in that the image forming apparatus requests data acquisition to the print server, the image forming apparatus may desirably be configured to be capable of switching the data acquisition destinations actively.
Further, there is a possibility that the output result may be different depending on the system configuration from that of the original data acquisition destination by switching the data acquisition routes. However, the data output that is not intended by a user may desirably be avoided as much as possible.